Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday June 17, 2009 @05:32PM
from the next-year-in-a-fusion-reactor dept.

fiannaFailMan writes "An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges. 'Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.' Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."

The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent.Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away - it's an impressive achievement: they have managed to double the time we have to wait. Great use of money. Since fusion was only "50 years away" when we started we where actually better off before we started to build that reactor (or the scientists where to optimistic, but whats the fun in that?).

Or is it possible that since governments fund research, not solutions, that's what they're getting -- research, not solutions. Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.

Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.

Scientist in lab: "Ha! Another positive energy run! Well, we'll just fudge the numbers so it looks like it took more energy to start the fusion than we got back. Can't jeopardize our funding..."

Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.

I don't know how you can skip the research and go straight to the solution. If you know how, then please go do it for fusion, and make yourself fabulously wealthy as you solve all our long-term energy problems.

And if you don't know how, then stop bad-mouthing the fusion scientists. Kthxbye.

Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.

And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...

And the researchers could get a Nobel Prize and could name their price for a job with a company building commercial fusion plants, and...

Yeah, score one for common sense there. Mod the AC up.

Forget the Nobel Prize, they'd be looking at their names in the history books. Nobel winners come and go, but technological breakthroughs of this magnitude happen a couple times a century, max. Do you know what most researchers in science and engineering would do for that kind of legacy?

The problem is not foot dragging (except on the part of the bean counters). Simply put, the problems associated with building a working fusion power plant, while not insurmountable, are still very difficult. Net energy o

Even if there is a breakthrough it is likely that some or all of the scientists will immediately quit the project and attempt to jump on board with "investor" companies as they rush to patent the fruits of what was formerly publicly funded research. It would become yet another classic case of privatization of profits and socialization of costs, losses, and risks.

For ITER specifically, one of the reasons the US wasn't involved early on was that ITER was promoting itself as a test for a commercial reactor. The US science community and the DOE didn't buy it, but were willing to fund a research focused reactor.

Since fusion was only "50 years away" when we started we where actually better off before we started to build that reactor

Congratulations, you have just proven that time travelers coming back from the future are clearly meddling in our affairs in an ongoing basis. I can only hope that it's a better future than Skynet - unless it's full of those hot Terminator babes!

The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent.
Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away

You make the mistake of believing the summaries of Slashdot editors. ITER is not an "EU" experiment, but as international as can be (the seven parties participating in the ITER program: the EU, India, Japan, PR China, Russia, South Korea, USA).

(And of course fusion is not 50 years away, it was already achieved 50 years ago in Operation Ivy... Commercially viable fusion - now that's an engineering problem;-) )

Commercial fusion will be "20 years away" after normal fusion. As always.

Commercial fusion - the merging of two small corporations into a single large one - is already commonplace. The problem is making it profit-positive; that is, how do you make the profits from that large corporation minus the sum of profits from the small ones be larger than the money spent on the fusion?

Commercial fission, on the other hand, is regularly used to energize in the marketplace, and is usually catalyzed by neutral parties, such as anti-trust committees. Spontaneous decay does occur, however one would be wise to avoid the particle companies thus emitted, as they tend to be irradiated with poisonous debt.

Both of these commercial power generation forms are somewhat controversial amongst some religious and philosophical groups, such as libertarians, who argue that the Limited Liability Force that governs large corporate interactions is contrary to their beliefs and thus an evil perversion of nature. Said groups would rather we'd stick with less efficient but more straightforward interactions between indivisible (except with a chainsaw) businessmen particles. Some also argue that the supply of Corporate Spin, which is a vital element of all interactions, is of limited supply and will be exhausted unless we deploy Astroturf Generators which, unfortunately, also produce and release weapon-grade bullshit into the environment. There is no known way to contain this contaminant.

I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?

Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May [guardian.co.uk] says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.

The last I'd heard from them, they had built a small module that could do inertial fusion, and could fire rapidly and for many cycles. They could be stacked to increase power, and in theory all they had to do (simplifying of course) was stack a bunch of these modules to make practical power generation, and a test product was supposed to be done in a few years.

Please, please, please tell me you're not a scientist of any sort! I really hope the late Bussard's ideas come to fruition, but the data from their previous experiments is awful (check those error bars people), and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut). ITER on the other hand is an engineering problem; we've done plasma containment. We don't know if a full scale polywell can work, and things look bad - we know tokamak fusion systems will w

You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)

and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut)

The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.

Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.

The current effort will build on what has been completed under these previous contracts as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of AGEE with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun.

God I hope they fail. I don't think humanity could ever overcome the shame of having something called a wiffleball be the ultimate source of our power.

It's also worth pointing out that there may be more in the fusor design than previously thought. A couple of places have recently rerun the old (debunked) cold fusion experiments with more sensitive measuring equipment. It turns out that the neutron output is slightly higher than the current models would tend to indicate. This doesn't mean cold fusion works, but it means that there is some stuff that physics doesn't fully explain in an area we thought was relatively well understood, which may be exploitab

the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome

Really? Have they really become more difficult? Like jumping off the high board becomes more difficult after you've climbed up there? Or truly more difficult, like trying to sell tickets to the hockey pool after the playoffs have ended?

In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change. Nothing has become harder, they've just realised that they're not as easy as they initially suspected.

It's the same as people in the 60s who thought that we'd have intelligent robot house servants and flying cars by now..

As has been pointed out before, the "flying cars" business isn't about technology, so much as safety and efficiency. We've got helicopters after all, and some models aren't much bigger than a car. Now try to imagine what a city full of DMV certified copter pilots, each in a machine more vulnerable and fragile than a car, all bumping into each other, would be like.

Back on topic, I think it's less about perceptions and more about easy problems versus hard ones. The easy problems of fusion have been solved.

Now we're up to sustaining it, and getting net power out of it, which are harder than the previous problems.

Or even getting net power out WITHOUT sustaining it.

You can get power from a fueled heat engine with continuous combustion. (Steam engines - both mobile and power plants - for example.) But repeated pulses of power work fine too (diesel cycle, otto cycle,...) and may have engineering advantages in some situations (i.e. trading efficiency for light weight, high power-to-weight ratio, and broad torqu

That's very much true for inertial confinement fusion, which uses the pulse model you describe. In those systems, ignition is akin to spark plugs for an IC engine - one spark, one mass of fuel ignited, repeat.

Magnetic fusion systems like ITER however are meant to use the heat of fusion to sustain ignition. This is probably going to be the more efficient approach, since it means not having to scrape together the energy for ignition repeatedly - start it up, and it'll keep going as long as you put fuel in a

Pointed out what to who -- everyone who understood perfectly without your help? Or the slashdotters with the same problems understanding plain English? No, the original wording was fine. It is the inappropriate and overzealous use of pedantry that is stupid.

Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome

No matter how many times I read it, I can't picture it being fine. Without massaging the meaning in your head, it is like saying "some people also believe that it is getting more difficult to solve a Rubik's Cube" just because those people have never actually tried to solve one before. It's stupid.

If they said "some people believe that the remaining technical hurdles to fusion are more difficult to overcome" it would have been better, but without some input from a genius or a serious stroke of luck, that's

No matter how many times I read it, I can't picture it being fine. Without massaging the meaning in your head, it is like saying "some people also believe that it is getting more difficult to solve a Rubik's Cube" just because those people have never actually tried to solve one before. It's stupid.

You mean because nobody had solved a Rubik's Cube before, and their previous estimation of the difficulty was shown to be an underestimate as they got further along in the process and learned more about the steps

I'm assuming I have hit a nerve, and it probably was you who picked up on me for being a pedant last time. It does seem a little strange to me that you are berating me for apparently trying to make myself seem smarter by pointing out others' errors, but I digress..

I haven't assumed that no extra meaning is possible. I have looked for the extra meaning and obviously figured the correct meaning probably within a tenth of a second as everyone else w

Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."

According to this article [economist.com], NIF has cost $4 billion so far - almost four times the original estimate. What saved the NIF from cancellation was that its backers persuaded politicians that it was vital for Americas nuclear programme.

Now it's funded the step after that, and included a request for a proposal for it to fund the third and final step.

At the end of that step (if it all works) we have a practical first demo power plant - about 100 megawatts of fusion power out from cheap and very abundant fuel. Proof of concept, a practical design good enough to displace fossil fuel and fission power plants (and perhaps aircraft carrier and battleship engines) that can be replicated, and probably enough engineering data to design something much better.

We have built working toroid reactors since the 1970s. Just such a reactor, JET, is mentioned in TFA. The problem is no longer whether such a design will work. Nor is ignition the problem; we've achieved that years ago. Controlled fusion exists, here, now, in the present. This wasn't the case in the 1970s (well, there were Farnsworth fusors and H-bombs, but those are both significantly different cases).

The problem now lies in getting net energy out of it, and keeping the reaction going over long enough durations to generate useful amounts of electricity. This is indeed physically possible (see for instance the centre of the sun), it's just very challenging from a practical standpoint. The engineering hasn't caught up, in part because the number of testbeds for new designs is sharply limited. ITER is supposed to be the next such testing ground for new engineering solutions, but as you can see, it's having trouble getting political and financial backing.

Also, this "fusion has been 50 years away for the past 30 years" meme gets on my nerves. It's selective perception, and utter bullshit. People remember the promise of fusion, but forget that we were politically and financially unwilling to pay for it. The research wasn't going to just happen magically, someone needed to underwrite it.

Had we done the needed R&D decades ago, we would be decades ahead of where we are now. We didn't. You get what you put in, and in this case we put in nowhere near what we ought to have. Result is that we're behind.

Getting net energy production was right around the corner in the '70s and apparently still is, except now the corner is a century away. There were tokamaks, magnetic bottles, laser inertial confinement systems, and other efforts in the 70s. The primary commercial fusion power developer, General Atomic, said fusion would account for significant amounts of commercial energy production by the year 2000. The milestone everyone was waiting for then, as now, was net energy production.
It may well get on your ner

it's a fallacy to think that pissing away money on a problem will solve it. We don't have the materials to make an energy positive Tokamak, nor the knowledge if confinement over such a long time period is possible in a toroid bottle. We don't need a solution for 100 years out, we need one now and the fusion reactor in the sky puts out more energy than a thousand earth civilizations could use.

I mean just consider the state of technology one hundred years ago. Advances in computational power alone should allow useful solutions of the diffeqs governing plasma containment. One might be able to make a case for 40 years but trying to push predictions about the future past that point doesn't seem particularly useful.Also I have to wonder how useful it is to learn that some scientists think that iter is going in the wrong direction. Of course some scientists do, otherwise why would we build an *expe

I want to agree with you. But the Manhattan project cost ~$24 billion in today's USD according to wikipedia, and at the end they had 2 working bombs.
When ITER has spent it's 20 billion, we'll hopefully have the knowledge we need to build a working power reactor.
Now. You might say that fusion energy is worth more than an atom bomb or two. But I doubt you would convince someone living in 1944 of that.

As for the computers solving the diffeqs. You may be right and you may be wrong.
The sad thing is, we do not have a set of differential equations that can accurately predict how plasmas will behave across strong magnetic fields. You may have heard that when fluid models are used in turbulent situations, they spit out 'correct' solutions which do not even closely resemble what's actually observed and until recently, the best fluid models pre

Just to be pedantic it's not that we lack diffeqs to describe the system just that we can't solve them preciscely enough.I mean we are pretty damn sure of the fundamental physics here. There is no quantum field theory weirdness that is needed to do this right (some quantum maybe) and there is enough material that the discrete size of atoms shouldn't make a difference so there MUST be a diffeq that will model it correctly.

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Seeing as I do computability theory I will tell you with ENOUGH computing power we

Thanks! You've given the best description of science I've ever read. Disclaimer: I am a scientist.

Seriously. A lot of the fancy topics are interesting because they are like a foggy mountain top, you know that there must be a mountain top, but you don't know the way, and you don't know what you will find up there, and which equipment you need to take along. This makes science different from engineering, where you at least would have a map of the mountain roads and altitudes etc.

The EU spends way more than that on agricultural subsidies every single year. I'm probably a cultural barbarian, but I happen to think that developing fusion, even if it will take a while, is more important than subsidising French wine.

As for all those "fusion will always be 50 years away" remarks: that's what happens if you never start. ITER could have started a decade ago, if everyone hadn't been fighting over where to build it. Fusion would be ten years closer if we had somehow managed to select a piece of ground somewhere in a reasonable amount of time.

They dont mean those 100 years seriously right ?
i mean look at it, 100 years ago we were happy to even have Power and just in the last 10 years much has developed.
Science these days is exponential so i expect that in 100 years we have either blown ourselves up somehow or we will have really cool stuff...fusion power will be old by then ^^

A back of the envelope calculation says that a paraffin sphere with a 200m radius can absorb the energy of a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb by melting. So we build ourselves a nice strong containment vessel out of a granite mountain, fill the hole with paraffin and set off a bomb, melt paraffin, boil water for a couple of months and then repeat. There is probably a better material than paraffin, but the basic idea is the same. Just a few minor engineering issues to work out and we could have one of these sucker

Believe it or not, that's been suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly in the USSR during the cold war.

It isn't all that practical a power source. There's no benefit to it over a conventional fission reactor, and several drawbacks. Notably, bombs are more expensive and challenging to make than fuel pellets, the security risk is much greater if somebody hijacks your fuel, radioactive material released in this manner has an annoying tendency to find it's way into the atmosphere or water table, and finally, whatev

Or we could just start making better use of the monster fusion reactor that is already in the neighborhood.

Totally, the energy source is already there, and being exploited rather efficiently by many organisms. I feel like we've hit a limit of the centralized power source model, and the practical future of energy is in collecting on the small scale and exploiting local sources. For example, here in San Diego I know several people who produce a net surplus of electricity from their solar panels, without any real effort at conserving use.
Big, dirty power supplies with massive infrastructure issues are so very d

Now my own ideas:1. There is no practical technology to store large amounts of energy, except building a very big artificial lake above the ground level and pumping water there.2. Power generated locally from renewables has a large seasonal variation in output, and is intermittent (except geothermal, but this is an i

Fusion is not 100 years away. It's already been achieved in JET, for example. What's 50-100 years away is a practical commercial fusion power plant with a lifetime measured in years.

In order to be practical, a fusion plant has to produce net power. ITER is expected to do that.

However, the materials issue remains. The interior of a tokamak, the "first wall", has to be able to withstand an intense neutron flux without degrading. ITER is going to be made out of stainless steel, which is fine for research; it wouldn't hold up very long in a 24x365 environment. For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.

These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous. I'm not sure whether canning ITER is a good idea. Scaling it back might be, but the problem is, a new reactor needs to be significantly larger than existing ones, in order to explore a different part of the parameter space. Large = still expensive.

At this point, the most important part of the ITER program, IMO, is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. We need better materials.

For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.

There are some really good ideas in fact. However we do not have the ability to test these ideas.

These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous

They have been ridiculous, and are 100% political, not scientific. The science of fusion has improved dramatically, confinement has improve many orders of magnitude. And ITER is a logical next step. But its not the only step. We could do smaller experiment on ELM or upgrade JET yet again, or....

We don't seem to be very good at "organizing" science at this kind of size, so smaller seems better with more speci

Anytime you have a large number of countries who are building something in which each is trying to gain control of it, there will be costs overrun. In addition, the IFR is capable of burning the WASTE nuke supplies. If advanced countries put these in, then the world will have but a fraction of the waste. 3rd world countries (developing nations; whatever) can put in older reactors that use simple reaction. And the argument about plutonium going to bomb making is a total fraud. As it is, we have Iran and Nor

"The walls of the box, which need to be leak tight, are bombarded by these neutrons which can make stainless steel boil. Some people say it is just a question of inventing a stainless steel which is porous to let these particles through; personally I would have started by inventing this material."

Maybe, just maybe, they should have checked if the technology was even developped before they started allocating funds and setting deadlines? Then again, I've always been pragmatic.

"countless billions of stars in the universe all doing nuclear fusion...and not a single one of them is shaped like a donut!â

There are other promising possibilities for fusion; maybe we should be funding those, instead of the Tokamaks which cost billions upon billions, and are now 100 years away. Furthermore, even if they do work, they will never be economically viable.

>We have two working examples of fusion generation, the Hydrogen Bomb that uses a fission device to jump start it and the Sun which is hugely radioactive.

Uhh, what? It's actually pretty damn easy to create fusion reactions in the labratory merely using ions and electric fields. Of course they are hugely energy negative but it's not like these are our only two examples of fusion. Also the response about the sun indicates a complete lack of understanding about the different types of radioactivity and the relation between this and fission.

It's not like we don't have a detailed understanding of how fusion works. We know there is no fundamental law barring fusion power, the issue is all about practical generation.

As one of the previous posters said, you have a remarkably poor understanding of stellar fusion. The fusion reaction within a star is triggered by the massive gravitational force exerted by the star's mass. The force is so great that the mass collapses in on itself until the tremendous pressure and heat of the collapse ignites a fusion process within the core. Once ignited, the fusion reaction's force pushes the mass outward, holding bac

I was under the impression that ITER was effectively the prelude to full scale fusion, and it was effectively just a scale up from previous designs to see if sustainable fusion was possible. This article makes it look as though fundamental problems remain unresolved; hardly reassuring when you're building a full scale unit with such major issues like what you're going to build the damn thing out of.

Where did you get that idea?

ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.

The problems with fusion are not really "fundamental". They're just difficult. None are deal-breake

ITER is going to be the testbed for the technology needed to make a commercial fusion reactor possible. The unsolved problems each have potential solutions to them, each of which will need to be tested. After ITER, the next step is a prototype reactor, one which incorporates the technology developed during the testing process. The step after that is commercial power generators.

This correct, but I wanted to point out the crucial difference between ITER and the NIF. The NIF is not anything close to a testbed for commercial fusion, it is simply an attempt to achieve a break-even plasma condition and produce an energy output in the 10-100 megajoule range. Tokamak type magnetic fusion systems achieved these milestones 12-15 years ago, using technologies directly relevant to commercial scale systems (i.e. superconducting magnets, plasma heating techniques etc.).

Once they get it working every energy company on the planet will compete to hire them to build fusion plants, as well as invest heavily into further research to make said plants cheaper to build and operate.

Does anyone ever read TFA at slashdot, or do any research before posting a comment. Oh... sorry, this is slashdot, of course they don't! The iter website [iter.org] actually lists the consortium as "China, EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA". Indeed if you want to get a job there, you need to be citizen of one of those areas. I'm British, which is (just about!) part of the EU, so I'm eligible. As it happens, they also include Switzerland with "EU", even though it isn't. The ITER project builds on the develo